Pat Clark: Wedding bells for ex-Modestan, celeb fiance

It will be a May wedding in New York for a former Modestan and his interior design guru boyfriend.

If you believe the Internet, that is. Modesto High School graduate Jeremiah Brent reportedly will wed celebrity designer Nate Berkus, who – again, according to the Internet – proposed to Brent at Machu Picchu.

Berkus recently said on “The Rachael Ray Show” that the pair are aiming for a 200-member guest list, according to a story from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. As celebrity weddings go, that seems like an intimate crowd.

Brent, who won viewer hearts during a stint on Bravo TV’s now-defunct “The Rachel Zoe Project,” has his own design firm with locations in Los Angeles and New York, Jeremiah Brent Designs. Berkus is a designer to the stars, hosted his own daytime talk show and currently can be seen as a judge on NBC’s new competition show “American Dream Builders.”

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He’s also known as Oprah’s favorite designer, so one might suspect that’s one major star who will be part of the 200 invited to the nuptials, yes?

The couple, who met in 2012, were spotted last year antiquing in Oakdale. Brent has family in Modesto, so it’s no surprise they’d be visiting the area. According to those good old Internet sites, Berkus left his New York home to move to Los Angeles to be near Brent.

The couple also recently were featured in a Banana Republic ad campaign.

I spoke to Brent in 2011 after his season on “Rachel Zoe,” and he was an absolute delight to talk to – very sweet, open and fond of his hometown. No luck getting in touch with him since, so if anyone has a contact, send it my way so we can catch up with Brent on how his life and career have progressed since leaving the Bravo show.

I know this comes late, but I have to get in my 2 cents on the “How I Met Your Mother” finale.

There was a lot of bemoaning of the whole mother-being-dead thing. I wrote previously – when rumors of just that plot twist were swirling – that I would be flaming mad if that were the case.

But, you know what? They paid such little attention to the mother in the final one-hour episode, it really didn’t seem like a big deal. As the story went, she’d been gone for six years already while Ted was regaling his kids with this nine-season tale.

That isn’t to say I wasn’t disappointed in the finale. I was. Big time.

Here’s why: They spent an entire season over-covering a single weekend of the wedding of characters Robin and Barney – and teasing viewers with Ted and the mother finally meeting. They spent a full hour in the final episode going over what happened to the five close friends over the years following. The actual meeting of the titular mother, as well as her time with Ted, was brief and glossed over.

And Robin and Barney, the couple who we all were led to believe were soul mates, divorced with such a decidedly “meh” kind of note, it was almost disgusting.

But the most disappointing part of all? The big ending, the supposed nine-year payoff when Robin and Ted turn out to be the true soul mates all along, consisted of maybe 30 seconds.

Seriously? You had a full season and one entire hour in the finale to mine some depth of feeling about this pair, and the sum total is Ted holding up a blue French horn to Robin as she looks down from her apartment window? The blue horn mattered because Ted once stole it for Robin as a sign of his affection and it reappeared over the course of the show as a symbol of their up-and-down relationship. OK, cute. But that’s it?

The best part of the episode was the ending credits, with snippets of the castmates from the show’s earliest days.

And so is killed yet another big finale; a new addition to the annals of great shows that somehow ended their runs with a great big clunker.